Transcripts For CSPAN2 David Michaels The Triumph Of Doubt 2

Transcripts For CSPAN2 David Michaels The Triumph Of Doubt 20240713

At grave risk, and in story after story this book chronicles how powerful players have hijacked the language of science to the detriment of we, the people, the essential bedrock of our democracy. Attacks on science and democracy are not new, though todays Political Climate brings them into sharp relief. Were witnessing the denial of facts and evidence, the dismantling of science and scientific the expertise in our federal agencies and the rollback of evidencebased public protections. The bottom line is that when science is sidelined in government decisions, people get hurt. And this assault poses an additional threat to our democracy. Indeed, the very fundamental institutions of our democracy our elected officials, appointed officials, our laws, our regulatory system, even the courts are under threat. Government is increasingly responding to the interests of the few over the interests of the many. Trust and confidence in our governmental and Public Institutions are eroding. Voter suppression, gerrymandering and the unfetteredded role of money in politics is undermining the basic functions of our representational democracy. Specifically, representing the people, all the people. These assaults are intertwined with the outsized role of money in politics. Money and dark money that cant be traced back to its sources is part of the connective tissue here. As are the results that were seeing; growing disparities, inequities and inequalities in our health, our wealth and our voices as citizens. The union with of concerned scientists was founded right down the street at mit 50 years ago because the students and faculty were concerned that science was being used for destructive rather than constructive ends. Our concern has only broadened and grown. It is showered by our showered by our shared by our 500,000 members and supporters including the 25,000 members of our expert science network. If you dont know about ucs, take a look at our web site, ucsusa. Org, and i hope you will join us. We are definitely stronger together. So with that, let me kick off tonight by introducing our intrepid interviewer, lawrence lessig, who is a professor of law and leadership at Harvard Law School previously having taught at both stanford law and the university of chicago. Hes the founder of a group called equal citizens, a nonprofit with one very ambitious mission. Basically, fixing our democracy by establishing truly equal citizenship. Hes the cofounder of creative commons, a nonprofit thats devoted to expanding the range of creative works thats available for others to build upon and to share legally. Basically this organization is a leader in the copy left, not the copyright [laughter] movement. And in addition to his law degree, larry has a masters in philosophy from the university of cambridge in england, and he has the distinction of clerking for two conservative justices. Judge richard posener as a seventh Circuit Court of appeals in chicago and Justice Antonin Scalia at the supreme court. Larry is the author of ten books, he has a captivating presence on ted talks. If you havent heard it, go on there and look. And we are totally delighted to have him as an interviewer tonight. [applause] and it is my very personal pleasure to introduce you to the author of this important and fearless book, dr. David michaels. Hes a scientist, an epidemiologist to be exact, a professor at George Washington universitys school of public health. He is a scientist, yes, but he has an illustrious career in public service. Under president obama he was the assistant secretary for labor for the Occupational Safety and health administration, osha. He was the longest serving administrator in to in oshas history. Read his chapter on deadly dust in this book, it will take your breath away. [laughter] in the clinton administration, david served at the department of energy as the assistant secretary of energy for environment, safety and health. He was of charged with protecting the workers, the Community Residents and the environment in and around this Nations Nuclear Power Plants Nuclear weapons facilities, sorry. [laughter] he crafted and then implemented a ken opinion sayings program a Compensation Program for workers whose health and lives and livelihoods were damaged by exposures at these facilities. This program has awarded more than 16 billion to these workers and their families. Throughout his career david has been a tireless advocate for public health, Worker Health and sciencebased public policies. This man knows the science. He has witnessed firsthand industry efforts to deny the science and the known dangers of those products. His work and now this book chronicles how product manufacturers have perfected the art of sowing doubt and deception all in service of delaying Government Action to protect public health. In other words, this man knows of what he speaks. [laughter] so i am proud to welcome my friend and my colleague to cambridge. Take it away. [applause] so thank you very much for that introduction and thank you so much, david, for this book and for everyone for coming. You know, ive been working in this field of corruption for about the last 12 years. And recently ive become increasingly optimistic. I can see paths to certain parts of them being solved and certain commitments that five years ago didnt exist in, for example, the political space. But i have to confess, when i finished this book so that i could provide a review and a blurb for the book, i felt like i had been punched in the gut. Because even though this has been my field in some sense not just in the concept of science, but in politics and the academy and all sorts of areas, this has been my field for so long, the profound extremity of this corruption i dont think has been better captured by anybody in any account than in this book. And its not just what i kind of talk about as good souls corruption where people are kind of led by incentives to go in the wrong direction and then i think thats a profoundly important problem. But well talk about the outrageous, selfconscious, intentional, unbelievable acts of wrong by entities that you would never imagine could engage in such wrongs. So heres my charge to you [laughter] of course, you come to an event like this, youre supposed to buy the book, and of course you should. But i dont think you should buy this book, i think you should buy five copies of this book [laughter] and you have to send four of them to friends who are not likely to understand or be sensitive to this especially if you happen to have any trump supporters. Im sure theres at least three in the audience. It is incredibly important that this message be spread. And it will only be spread for reasons were going to talk about from the bottomup. Because every powerful institution in our society has an interest in this perspective not being understood in the powerful and effective way that i think david has presented it here. So im honored to be in this conversation with you, david. And what were going to do is have david read a little bit at the beginning, and then well have a conversation, and then im eager to get to your questions. Larry, thank you so much. [inaudible] thank you all for coming out on this miserable night. For those of you watching on cspan, it is pouring outside and good to see everybody here. Ill read a little bit and then well dive in. Where is the ceo today who, in the face of public concern about a potentially dangerous product, says lets hire the best scientists to figure out the problem is real, and then if it is, stop making the stuff . [laughter] in fact, evidence from decades of corporate crisis behavior suggests exactly the opposite. The um we e discuss is to impetus is to take the low road and attack, attack, attack the science underpinning the concerns. Of course, idealogues will never say they value profits before the health of their employees or the safety of the public. Theyll never say that their care less about our water and air than environmentalists do, but their actuals belie the rhetoric. Most people have come to expect corporations to [inaudible] its in the corporate dna. We dont expect mercenary sign difficults. Scientists. Science is supposed to be above the fray. This book is about those science for sale specialists and the product Defense Industry that sustains them, the a cabal of [inaudible] and political lob bests who use lobbyists who use bad science. Its a version of the old joke, turn on the blue with light, the men want the blue suit. [laughter] much of their work involves production of scientific materials that purport to show the product the corporation uses or even discharges as air or Water Pollution is just not very dangerous. These useful experts produce impressive looking reports and publish the results of their studies in peerreviewed journals reviewed, of course, by [inaudible] writing the articles. I describe this Corporate Strategy as manufacturing doubt or manufacturing uncertainty. My objective is to identify, characterize and ill illuminatee strategy so readers can see exactly what these mercenary scientists and the firms that hire them are doing. In just about every coronerrer of the corporate world corner of the corporate world, studies and will be are deemed irrelevant, dismissed as not representative and discredited as unreliable. Always theres too much doubt about the evidence, not enough proof of harm, not enough proof of enough harm. Its Public Relations disguised as science. The companies pr experts provide scientists with contrarian sound bites that play well with reporters who are mired in believes there must be two sides to every story. The scientists are deployed to influence regulatory agencies or to defend against lawsuits by people who believe they were injured. The corporations and their higher guns market their studies and reports as sound science, but actually they just sound like science. [laughter] [applause] there you go. Okay. So this book is a continuation really of your earlier book, doubt is their product. Right. And whats common between these two books is the description of a Business Model which is perfected by really just a handful of really powerful and effective firms, the most prominent in the stories you tell is a firm called hill and nolton. When a business discovers they have a product or they have a chemical thats coming out of their product or they have something that is threatened as unsafe, this firm will come to them and pitch the idea that they can at least delay the inevitable. Its not like they really question the facts. In the earlier book you talked about lead e and chromium 6 and all these chemicals, which there was no tout about the harm no doubt about the harm. But there was a recognition that they could put off the regulators long enough and continue to earn millions of dollars for six or twelve or fifteen years, and the net benefit of that money would obviously be much greater than any cost they would face for continuing to do that harm. So twenty years down the road well finally figure it out, and maybe we can move on to something else. Whats so striking the about that Business Model, how do those people sleep at night . [laughter] i mean, you know, you can imagine like, i make lawyers for a living, right . Lawyers go into courtrooms and like, you know, they have a defendant. They might believe their defendants guilty, or theyre not going to ask that, and theyre going to work as hard as they can to get their defendant off. They can kind of feel good about themselves. But in this context, these people must know that what they are doing is acting to actually harm people. So as youve met these people, how have you understood their psychology . Well, thats a great question. Obviously, you have to wrestle with. I actually think theres a way that people rationalize their work. Go back to the 1994 hearings and the tobacco executives in front of congressman waxman. These ceos have college degrees, theyre lawyers in many cases who stood up with their right hands, said they swore to tell the truth, and the last question was do you think nicotines addictive. Ask theyd say no or i dont know. Where have were they lying . Actually, a lot of these people have convinced themself of, you know, sort of black is white. Theres a famous quote that i bin the book with begin the book with, its difficult to convince man of something when his philosophy depends on him not believing it. People clearly think that theyre doing the right thing, but the problem around this is hill and nolton started this with tobacco, but the reality of science firms that have figured out they can do the Public Relations and they can to science. Theyre very impressive. They look like theyre scientists. They produce, you know, all these reports that exonerate different chemicals. And its, you know, i can think theyve convinced themself whatever evidence they look at isnt real. Okay, but some of those people, well, the executives in a tobacco company, obviously, a lot hedges hinges on them getting thing it is right. You tell the story of volkswagen. I mean, the story of volkswagen which, again, i had known there was some scandal, and i just assumed it was some kind of fudging the numbers scandal. But the story, the actual story you tell is so astonishing because what volkswagen did on their diesel cars was to devise a mechanism that would detect when emissions were being measured. And when the emissions were being measured, they would turn down the emissions. And when they werent, it would go up 40 times from the amount that was coming out. Right. Now, theres way [inaudible conversations] were ambiguous about what they were doing. They clearly believed and clearly knew what they were doing was lying to regulators and the pluck about the harm being created. This wasnt ambiguous. It was intentional hi producing harm in the world. And it actually gets worse. [laughter] not only did they do that, and theres evidence the ceo knew exactly that, when the International Agency for research on cancer analyzed the studies on the effects of exposure to diesel particulates and determined that they cause lung cancer, volkswagen said, well, we need to respond. And so they said lets pay for a study that will, you know, respond to that. And so the first model was that they would put people into a chamber on bicycles and pump in some gas and show that it didnt have a big effect on the but the idea of a company pumping gas into a chamber [laughter] the optics were bad. So they finally decided to do a study in new mexico in a laboratory using nonhuman primates, using monkeys. But this paying for that study and doing it, thaw actually made sure to they actually made sure to bring in one of the volkswagen devices to rig the study. Is so they knew the study was going to in fact, they messed that the up as well. You know, i tend to be optimistic and see the best in people, so i think how could they possibly know exactly that theyre lying. But in this case, larry, youre absolutely right. They knew exactly what they were doing. Okay, so they knew what they were doing, but again these firms like hill and nolton, its got to be that they come home at the end of the week, and they think ive been in the business of making people sick or less safe or hurting people. Thats my job, to actually hurt people x. That idea, the idea that there are those people is just hard or to and, you know, a lot of these are firmses, theres a firm near cambridge called gradient. Their Business Model is based on turning out these reports saying these pollutants arent dangerous. They work for exxonmobil and companies [inaudible] so the fact that we allow those reports to go into, you know, government regulatory proceedings is really, to me, very questionable. We shouldnt we should just discard these because they were not produced reports that dont support exactly what whoever paid for it wanted. Its the golden rule of science, if you have the gold, you make the rules. And whats so striking is it doesnt actually take a lot of money in the end. You were talking about the test in new mexico. That contract was written so that there was a contingency amount that they would not get until they produced the results that they were supposed to produce. And so they were not able to produce those results. But they bent over backwards the produce conditions, to produce those results for 71,000, thats all that was at stake. But they completely sold their soul as a Testing Company for the purpose of just 71,000. Its a tiny, little amount of this corrupting influence here which is capable of distortion in a really mass i way. Another story i tell is about talc baby powder which is, you know, a common product that we all have used. We put it on ourselves, on our babies, marketed by Johnson Johnson to women for personal hygiene, especially africanamerican women. Its generally [inaudible] its very difficult to have talc without asbestos contamination. And weve known that for 40 years. Honestly, thats a problem for Johnson Johnson, companies that make baby powder that dont want to be labeled as having asbestos in it because youre [inaudible] you like the stuff, i mean, there have been times when the government has tried to characterize talcum powder as carcinogenic. One considered labeling talc. [inaudible] as causing cancer. The industry, the trade association Johnson Johnson belongs to belonged to, and the Money Company hired the same consultant who worked for the Tobacco Industry to essentially confuse the scientists on the board of sign scientific fox problem. One of the memos says time to come up with more confusion. And they were successful. The government sort of favor up. They were outgunned and, you know, that issue was still going on. Of and now there are these huge lawsuits, and Johnson Johnson actually is theres one lawsuit which i talk about in the book which 22 women with Ovarian Cancer sued john and johnson. The jury awards them each 25 million, but then they look at these documents that i ta

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